


resurrection whiplash

by Werepirechick



Series: SBURB.exe Loading [1]
Category: Homestuck, Tales of Arcadia (Cartoons), Trollhunters - Daniel Kraus & Guillermo del Toro
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Fluff, Gen, God Tier, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, SBURB (Homestuck), Temporary Character Death, Video Game Mechanics, a friend encouraged this so now everyone has to see it too, at the ending bit, everyone gets jammies and trauma its great, idfk what to tag this as really, its the TH crew! and the 3B crew! in SBURB!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 03:37:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19369090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Werepirechick/pseuds/Werepirechick
Summary: “What doesanyof this mean?” Toby despairs, poking around in his stats again. He’s got all his weapons- excluding his Starburst Surprise hammer, which he dropped when he got lasered- and all his other miscellaneous items in his iTunes Fetch Modus also accounted for. It asks him if he’d like to install the latest update, version 17.5. Toby hitsremind me laterfor the seventeenth time in a row.“I think it means that we got a lucky break,” Claire says, patting his arm. “You got killed, and I got killed-”“Wait youdied?”“-but now we’re both fine! Physically speaking. Emotionally and mentally I think I’m a little fucked up.”“That has been our entire week, Claire.”





	resurrection whiplash

**Author's Note:**

> watch me play fast and loose with my homestuck knowledge, since i haven't read the earlier chapters in years and barely wiki searched stuff. i just want to destroy the universe and make a bunch of kids into gods aight?
> 
> anyway, starting this au off right with some rare warstaff content. shippy if u squint at it right, but that's definitely not the focus of the drabble.

The last thing Toby sees is a Bedrock Behemoth, shaped like a sushi cat mixed with a human skull, blasting _laser beams_ out of its eyes at him.

(Why has Sushi Cat become such a horror? Why couldn’t Claire chill with the Papa Skull merch? _Why in god’s name did Krel prototype his sprite with a laser gun?_ )

Getting shot through the chest with lasers hurts about as much as he could have imagined. Which is a moment of such pure agony Toby doesn’t even have any final thoughts- they’re burned out of him as the cauterized holes in his chest stream noxious smoke and he falls backwards.

There’s a period of nothingness.

And then everything comes rushing back into him, brilliant and golden and _bright._

Toby has to let out a cry of exhilaration, energy surging within him, rocketing up into the air and throwing his arms up at the sky. The horizon stretches on and on around him, the ambient warm light of the Land of Canyons and Stairwells turning the rocky terrain rich reds and browns and golds. Wind billows around Toby as he hangs there, feeling like every part of himself is somehow much more _alive_ than it used to be. Filled to the brim with- with _something,_ and it feels like afternoon sun, like hard earned triumph, like pushing past his limits and finding renewed strength, it feels like-

It feels like hope. Like _Hope._

Toby pats his chest, finding no holes. He doesn’t even feel worn out anymore- a big improvement after being chased by Ogres and Serpents and Behemoths for nearly a half hour. He’d barely been able to send a text for help while he was running; hitting his most recent contact as the recipient just as a Serpent slammed into him and sent his phone flying. It got crushed in seconds after by the horde of game monsters pursuing him.

Toby starts to ask himself how he went from being laser beamed to death, to floating hundreds of feet in the air, feeling just fine. He’s distracted almost immediately by pale fabric fluttering out around him as the wind blusters.

Toby grabs the fabric. The fabric is attached to him. Specifically, attached to him in the form of a long _skirt._

Or- maybe a dress? Toby tugs on the clothes he’s apparently wearing, twisting around on himself and trying to figure it out. He’s got gold pants on, thank god, that end in gentle puffs below his knees, tucked into long white socks. No- bandages? Wrapped around his shins. The long-sleeved skirt-dress-tunic thing, a warm yellow, is cut in a way that it only covers his front and back, leaving most of the sides of his legs exposed. The wind lifts something on the back of his neck and smacks his head with it; a hood.

The celebratory effect of still being alive is wearing off, so now everything is just terribly confusing again. SBURB as a whole has been terribly confusing.

Something grabs his shoulder right then, which sends Toby shrieking and spinning in the air.

“Toby- Toby, it’s me!”

“Wh- _Claire?!”_

Claire smiles tiredly, nodding. Her clothes are just as strange as his- but wildly different. A dark blue skirt swirls around her as she hovers near him; billowing along with the twin-tailed hood she has, the same navy blue as her long-sleeved shirt.

“How d’you feel?” Claire asks, flying closer and taking his hand. Toby grips back fiercely; his initial joy is becoming panic, not just because Claire scared the bejesus out of him, but because they’re _flying._

“I- I don’t know?” Toby manages, head spinning. He glances down and then flinches badly, jerking his eyes back up to Claire’s. “Hey, could you explain why the fuck we’re _flying?”_

“God Tier,” Claire answers calmly. “It’s okay. I was freaked out the first little while, too.”

“Freaked out is an understatement. Am I in heaven? Oh god I remember dying. Claire I DIED, OH MY GOD!”

“Toby, you didn’t- I mean, you sort of _did,_ but just temporarily!”

Toby sucks in a harsh breath, shaking. “I- I need to be on the ground, or I’m gonna have a panic attack right the fuck now.”

“Oh, okay! Yeah, uh, how do I do this again I know I- _right.”_ Claire’s face abruptly turns into a void of pure abyss, and Toby’s sight cuts out for a moment.

Light and the world come rushing back just as abruptly, and Toby stumbles as his feet realize there’s ground underneath them again. He throws his arms around the only thing close enough to stabilize him, clinging tightly.

“I hate this game,” Toby says fervently. “I _hate it.”_

Claire pats his head, apparently not minding that he’s using her as his lifeline. “I know. I hate it, too. But, uh… at least I got to bring you back to life? Instead of you just, you know… staying un-alive.”

“Yes. Thanks. I don’t like being un-alive. Could you maybe explain why that’s a thing? Please? Am I a zombie right now? I don’t exactly _feel_ undead but who the fuck knows with this stupid game!”

“Deep breaths, Toby. Take ten of those and then we’ll sit down, have a nice chat about everything that happened while you were, uh. Let’s call it being away from the keyboard. Welcome back from AFK, Toby.”

Toby laughs, and if he had a clearer head he’d be proud that it’s only semi-hysterical. He takes the ten deep breaths, hugging Claire while he does. By his tenth inhale and exhale, he’s able to let her lower them both to the ground. Toby is grateful for that; his legs feel like jelly.

“So, uh… what the hell happened to me?” Toby asks, after a moment of staring blankly at the horizon. Still majestic. Still full of staircases which mostly lead nowhere, or worse, in _circles._

“I didn’t get there in time to save you,” Claire admits in a quiet voice. She sighs, leaning against his side and putting her head on his shoulder; Toby leans in turn, head on hers. It’s a comfort, after the previous few minutes of insanity. “None of us could, actually. The Game leveled up or something; everyone was in the same situation as you. I’m- I’m just lucky I had Notenrique back on my planet, ‘cause I… I got killed, too.”

Toby goes very still. He can’t stop himself from looking at Claire, eyes searching frantically for any sign of injury. He can’t see any tears or punctures in her clothes, but-

“Oh my god- is that blood?!” Dark reddish stains speckle the blue shades, obvious to him now that Toby has stopped flipping out.

“It’s not mine,” Claire says quickly. She sits upright again, meeting his eyes sheepishly. “It’s, uh, yours, actually. I carried you here, after I found you.”

‘Here’ being the worn down temple, carved into the side of the canyon. Toby had checked it out not too long after they started their session; what information he could get from the glyphs and consorts basically told him he wasn’t a high enough level yet for whatever puzzles lay within. So he left it alone.

“And… why? I mean, not that I’m not grateful, but how’d I go from being literally dead to, uh, what was it?”

“God Tier.”

“Yes, that.”

“It’s supposed to be what we Ascend to, once we’ve completed all our levels. Or something?” Claire shrugs. “Krel and Aja and Eli were all talking over each other, I basically just caught the bit where someone comes back from the dead supercharged with powers.”

“Powers? I have _powers_ now?”

“Yeah! Check your stats; mine jumped up by an insane level.”

Toby, for lack of other clear options, pulls up his game stats. The screen pops up in front of him, which he and Jim had, at the beginning of things, described as distinctly SAO like. He scrolls through his profile and items, selecting the option to let him see his echeladder. The action proceeds to fill the screen with lurid neon colors, digital streamers and poppers accompanying the lightshow.

“I- wow, okay. I’m maxed out on that one,” Toby remarks in disbelief. His whole echeladder is filled to the top; it also seems to have a secondary page, now? It’s labelled God Tier, so he presses it.

Claire whistles appreciatively. “Ooh, ‘Majestic Cleansweep’? Sounds better than mine, ‘Midnight Superintendent’. Like, what does that even mean?”

“What does _any_ of this mean?” Toby despairs, poking around in his stats again. He’s got all his weapons- excluding his Starburst Surprise hammer, which he dropped when he got lasered- and all his other miscellaneous items in his iTunes Fetch Modus also accounted for. It asks him if he’d like to install the latest update, version 17.5. Toby hits _remind me later_ for the seventeenth time in a row.

“I think it means that we got a lucky break,” Claire says, patting his arm. “You got killed, and I got killed-”

“Wait you _died?”_

“-but now we’re both fine! Physically speaking. Emotionally and mentally I think I’m a little fucked up.”

“That has been our entire week, Claire.”

“Yep, and it just does not look like it’ll ever stop being that way.” She throws her hands up, dramatically proclaiming, “This is it! This is our week for the rest of eternity! Every week forever will now be exactly as stupid and terrible as this one and we all just have to get used to it! At least I’m a Witch now I guess, ‘cause that’s the only redeemer right now.”

“Witch?”

“Of Void. I’m the Witch of Void. Check your character title, yours probably changed, too.”

Toby looks to his still open stats. Next to his name up in the top corner, it now has a dash between it and the title _Maid of Hope._ Toby stares at it incredulously for a solid three seconds, before saying, “I’m a fucking _maid?_ What kind of game role is that?”

“Yours, clearly.”

“Okay so I was already pissed off to begin with, ‘cause I freaking DIED today, but now I’m seriously mad. You get to be a witch and I get to be a _maid?”_

“I can hear you not capitalizing the first letters,” Claire comments, then adding, “It’s not so bad, I’m sure a Maid can do all sorts of cool stuff. Like, I can _teleport,_ which is really handy, even if I gotta finagle with the concepts of controlling where we _aren’t_ so that we can be there instead of where we are. Were. Uh, I need to read the guide Krel threw together again.”

Toby closes his stats and puts his head in his hands. “This is an awful, terrible, completely idiotic game.”

“It really is,” Claire says sympathetically. She lets him take a few more minutes of just sitting where they are, orange dust lifting from the ground now and again when a stiff breeze blows by. Toby asks her, after a bit, how she died and came back, and how Notenrique was involved.

Claire tells him she made a miscalculation, and Notenrique had enlisted consorts to drag her to her Quest Bed afterwards. She’s quiet for another beat, and then carries on with the rest. On her planet, the Land of Noir and Graphite, a trade deal with carapacians from Derse went south. Claire admits that it’d been more of a longshot than she’d been willing to acknowledge; forming an alliance with Dersite courtiers with a history of literal backstabbing. The trade of LONAG’s mineral resources in exchange for helping them overthrow the Black King and Black Queen, however, had been too tempting a prize to resist.

“Turns out,” Claire says sullenly, “I’m not as good as my mom is- _was_ at political schemes.”

“Hey, you did what you thought was right,” Toby comforts, putting an arm around her shoulders and giving his friend a side-hug.

“Which was a dumb choice,” she says sulkily. After a beat, she puts her arm around him, too. “Sorry I didn’t tell anyone I was doing that- I should’ve been tipped off from the get-go that they didn’t want me informing our team. Said it was for security reasons, to protect against other Dersites intercepting our messages… Ugh, I was so stupid.”

“You gave someone your trust, for the benefit of all of us. I don’t think you making allies is stupid, based on one misjudgement of character. Don’t let it ruin you for trusting other potential allies in the future, dude- we’re really gonna need ‘em.”

“Yeah?”

“Totally. You’re smart, you learn from your mistakes. Next time, you’ll pick the right person. Or NPC. What are the carapacians, again? They seem pretty sentient to me.”

“Who even knows anymore. I have giant spiders on my planet that talk like they’re from _The Godfather_ and smoke cigars. Everything is up in the air at this point.”

Toby laughs, Claire joining him. It’s a good tension release; settling the remainder of their nerves. Claire then disentangles herself from Toby and stands up, dusting off her skirt briskly.

“Well, let’s go kick some monster ass,” she declares with a wry smile. “I kinda just remembered that we’re not alone in this universe and our friends might still need our help.”

“Oh shit, I forgot.” Toby stands up, too, patting off his own dusted skirt. “I feel kinda bad about that now.”

“We’ll say sorry for being bad friends once we save them,” Claire promises lightly, as they’re both compartmentalizing any concerning implications their absence may have caused. She waves her hand and pulls up her sylladex, the Index Fetch Modus as organized and bland as it always is. She scrolls to the letter she needs and selects something filed under it.

Toby gasps in delight as his missing Warhammer pops into existence.

“Figured you’d want this back,” Claire says with a grin, handing the glittering weapon to him with minor difficulty. Toby takes it like it’s as light as air, standing a few steps back to swing it, testing the weight.

Starburst Surprise is in perfect condition, minus the bits of game gore from smashing enemies. The star themed weapon shimmers with twinkling constellations, the hammer’s gilded sides like miniature suns. Toby already feels more confident, holding it in his hands.

“ _Thank you,”_ he says, genuinely happy for its return. That is the baseline of what makes him happy lately. Getting back something he misplaced. The bar is on the ground and it’s so awful it’s funny.

“You’re welcome,” Claire says, curtsying. She decapchalogues her latest stavekind- one he hasn’t seen before. Upon inquiry for its name, Claire replies, “It’s called Malevolence’s Crucifixion.”

Toby peers at the stave, which to him looks like a mixture of the Shadow Staff and a bladed cross. “Huh. Should I be reading any subtext into it?”

“Nah. I just thought it looked cool.”

“So like, an extra goth Evangelion staff?”

“Essentially.”

“That’s so awesome.”

Claire twirls her staff- its purple energy crackling faintly- and wisps of darkness start to seep from her body. “You ready to kick ass like a god?” she says, Void bleeding into her figure and turning her into a blot of pure darkness.

“Kinda uncomfortable with how we’ve gotten to this point, but sure.” Toby doesn’t flinch away as the shape of Claire’s hand reaches for his; taking it and allowing himself to be whisked away to somewhere they’re not.

 

-/-

 

Belatedly, as they’re hunting through the Land of Junk and Frogs post-chatroom strategy session on their phones, Toby wonders aloud if they should’ve stopped and tried to figure out what his new abilities are before they ran off looking for a fight.

“We’ve gotten this far with winging it, haven’t we?” Claire says as they fly over the hills of miscellaneous junkyard scrap. The frogs of the planet have made homes in it; pools of water in cracked basins and tubs, stubborn plants clinging to rusted metal.

“Yeah, and it’s gotten two of us dead,” Toby retorts, looking through missed messages on his phone since they started their search. “Or maybe more, actually! Eli and Mary won’t respond to the group chat.”

“It’ll be fine. Future Aja said we’d all be alright in the end- eventually, anyway. As long as Krel doesn’t get eaten by his Denizen.”

“I have faith in Aja, but not so much in the whole time-travel shenanigans.”

“Aw, but that’s you’re whole thing, Toby! You’re our _Hope,_ you have to believe in us!”

“My class kinda makes it sound like it’s my job to be hopeful for you guys. It feels forced? Like someone telling you to do something you were already planning to. I want to but now I feel annoyed about it.”

Claire hums sympathetically, spinning slowly in the air. They’re passing by a haphazard hill of alloy beams; like a game of pick up sticks, but supersized. Still no sign of where Krel went, or even his Sprite. The troubling part of things is that he went somewhere Claire can’t just pull him back from to be where he’s currently not. Or something along those lines, at least. Witchy Void magicks are complicated.

Toby huffs. At least they’re more understandable than whatever a Maid can do. Is he just supposed to hope things into happening? Or hope his friends into succeeding? Is there a magic word, or an incantation, or _something?_ And god forbid if his job is to clean up after everyone else now.

Toby deeply regrets losing his copy of Krel’s Game Guide that he typed up and printed for them all, prior to entering the actual game. What he wouldn’t give to have a cheat sheet right now; whenever he got stuck on a level in a normal video game he’d just look it up online. Video tutorials from devoted gamers and wiki pages of strategies- Toby _really_ misses the internet, god it was so useful.

The hoodie pocket of his dress suddenly feels warmer than it should, and he puts a hand into it. His fingers meet a slim object, thin in width, and held together by- staples?

Toby pulls out the object, which is glowing bright, bright yellow. Claire does a double take and yelps as she accidentally somersaults in mid-air as she tries to stop. Toby just stares in awe as the rectangle loses its glow and becomes the Game Guide he lost days ago.

“Okay, that wasn’t there before,” he says faintly, turning it around- both sides have Krel’s handwriting scribbling out the title and contents- and then opens it. Inside are all the little cheat codes and bonus info and possible secret levels that Krel deciphered off his copy of the game.

“Did you just make that?” Claire asks in stunned wonder, brushing her fingers along the pages’ edge.

“I think so? Maybe??” Toby says, just as stunned and wondering.

“Wow,” says Claire.

“I know,” says Toby.

“Did you just figure out you can do that? Can you make _other_ stuff? Oh whoa Toby can you make a way for us to _find Krel?”_

“I don’t know? _Maybe??”_

“ _Try it!!”_

Toby stuffs the guide back into his hoodie pocket, shutting his eyes and concentrating on Krel, on _finding Krel,_ forcing something useful to materialize and lead them straight to their missing team member.

“…Anything?” Claire asks after nearly a full minute.

Toby lets out a harsh breath, opening his eyes. “Nope. I dunno how I made the guide appear, but I don’t think whatever I did works like this.”

“Well, guess we’re back to grid searching. Gimme the guide- I’ll see if he left any notes about places he was going to check out personally.”

“No it’s mine, I’ll read it.”

“I’m the faster reader, and I have better memory.”

“Yeah, and I’m the guy who made the magic game guide! I’m reading it.”

Claire gives him a flat stare, and then raises an open hand. Toby stares back, holding their staring contest- and then an absence of light collects in Claire’s hand and forms into his guide.

Toby splutters, patting his pocket. It’s very much gone and now in Claire’s hand. She smirks, pleased with herself for teleporting an object to a place it wasn’t or some bullshit.

“Rude!” Toby exclaims, grabbing for his booklet.

Claire titters and flies out of range, shooting off. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law!”

In contrast to their rather serious search and rescue efforts, they play keep-away in the skies of LOJAF together, darting around and trying out their new powers with varying successes. After the long week they’ve had, if questioned on their behavior they’d say they deserved the reprieve.

**Author's Note:**

> the only other tiers i can confirm for other characters are jim and aja's- Knight of Heart and Rogue of Time respectively. i haven't had time to sit down and brainstorm beyond that, sorry. been busy with life.
> 
> uh. i have a [trollhunters blog?](https://chillahead-bridge.tumblr.com/) come by if you wanna chat about my cursed au in the year 2019.


End file.
